I think my hard drive is dying......

One specific sound is the infamous COD or "clicking of death" just prior to a drive crash! click! click! click! click! is heard steadily as the drive head bounces against the platter until... :eek: :confused: nothing? what quit? At that time for a single drive single OSed system... "nothingness" becomes the norm. Yet the all the lights and fans are still working! Have you listened for any sign of cod? Or are you simply having a Windows glitch of some type?
 
A clicking sound, bad sectors popping up, disappearing files, very long wait while accessing files, reoccuring error messages when you move/copy/delete/create files. Stuff like that.
 
Well..... I have been getting a lot of memory read errors exiting games (probably un-related) unexplained slowness/lag in games, programs and game settings don't seem to save anymore/cache being dumped, the GRUB error as described in my other posts, over-all unreliability.....

My real problem is, if it is failing, there's nothing I can do about it until it actually fails and I have a valid excuse to replace it, otherwise, I would have gotten a new one and RAIDed it with fault tolerance.......
 
Has the case been bumped around any from moving it for any reason lately? Or have you defragged it lately? There are an obvious number of things that can cause slowdowns like background apps and services and antivirus programs especially are known to cause problems when gaming. The wrong driver version for video or sound can result in memory errors. The problem there sounds far more software then hardware related.
 
Cromewell said:
A clicking sound, bad sectors popping up, disappearing files, very long wait while accessing files, reoccuring error messages when you move/copy/delete/create files. Stuff like that.
Click to expand...

I just went through all of these symptoms and within one week My drive was useless. Luckily it was my backup drive and I was able to copy those files to my external drive. I have yet to work with these files on the external drive though....

Wish you the best luck!
Mako
 
I've defragged recently as well as a fresh reformat..... My biggest problm though, fro example, is whenever I play CS:S, it allways loads certain plug-ins everytime I load a level and I had a lor of problems with xfire and saving its settings.....
 
Saving settings in a game can also point at a software glitch in the game like Cromewell pointed out. The one thing now seen in Vista by the way is memtest! If you think you are having memory problems that is now an option on the boot menu.
 
I've already done several memtests and they have come out fine, but I'm guessing that's for RAM..... I'll post a SMART test later.........
 
One thing I found that caused a good number of problems in games is sound not video drivers. Sometimes you have reinstall the current set too to see them load correctly. This can happen even with the latest updates. I also tend to be skeptical on memtest since that is known to show errors when there are no actual faults. :confused:

The current 2gb of ram here saw some 573 error on the old board. :eek: When tested on the current none were seen? :confused: hhmmm... That's why I was a little surprised to see memtest in Vista! :rolleyes: The free memory tester just isn't so reliable anymore I guess.
 
Yup, now I'm sure it's dying..... Contrary to what the report says, I'm now getting a high whine from it..... Hopefully, that's enough evidence to qualify a new hard drive......

Untitled0-7-3-57.jpg
 
Incoming! "crash"! Your drive's read-write head is about to hit the platter once too often and say... "I'm sorry master I am now d... o... a..."! :( Saving anything worth saving is now your new assignment before... ??? Better get some blank media for data disks fast.
 
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